3-23-05, 10:14 am
Editor’s Note: Lisa Duggan is an activist, journalist and cultural historian. She teaches at New York University and is the author of Twilight of Equality. She was interviewed by Elena Mora.
PA: What is the connection between cultural issues (gay rights, abortion, etc.) and economic issues and why is it important?
LD: After the election there was a lot of pressure to separate cultural issues from economic ones and to say that cultural issues led in a conservative direction. Progressives are all arguing even more strongly than ever, like Thomas Frank (author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?) did, that economic issues are really what people need to emphasize. That’s not wrong – that economic issues need to be emphasized – it’s just that they are not separable. The economy is a culturally constituted thing, how people live their economic interests – that’s a cultural question. There’s no sense in which you can ever talk about how people relate to the notion of their economic interests without taking into account the vocabulary, concepts, institutions and the whole cultural context.
My book, the Twilight of Equality, has a couple of case studies, apart from gay marriage, which we can get back to. Not too long ago there was a big scandal at SUNY New Paltz about a women’s studies conference there, called 'Revolting Women.' It had several panels on lesbian sexuality, safe sex, etc. The 'right wing' came in and attended the panel, including one of the trustees of SUNY, and they generated a high profile exposé about how your taxes are being used to talk about these completely non-academic things. It got national visibility. The defense of the conference was staged primarily on the grounds of academic freedom — the 'everybody has a right to free speech on campus' response. People tried to defend the women’s studies program for having a conference partly organized by students who had a right to raise any issues they wanted to.
But nobody saw that the trustee belongs to a group called Change New York. It’s actually a group of CEOs of major corporations in the state of New York. They didn’t care about the lesbian panels at the conference, but they’d been trying to downsize the state education system. They had been working to lower taxes on corporations and to shrink the size of CUNY and SUNY, to centralize their administrations, de-democratize them, limit access and do away with some programs. So, they sent in one of the trustees to do this exposé. Attacking public higher education in New York is not easy to do, people will defend it. So how do you create a public opinion that’s willing to go along with downsizing public education?
They created this scandal and used it against the president of the SUNY New Paltz campus because he held out against corporatization. He was just a garden-variety liberal, but he was holding out for the liberal ideal of higher education. They had wanted to get rid of him for a long time, but they couldn’t until this scandal.
The problem is that this controversy was received as if it were merely cultural, and had nothing to do with economics or corporate interests. Almost no one, except Alisa Solomon, who was writing in the Village Voice at that time, put it together and said that the culture wars, in many cases, are attacks on institutions that create public democratic culture, that re-distribute resources downward and that make it possible to expand the political public sphere. This was about money, corporate interests and democracy. It was an instance where seeing things as only cultural meant missing the point, which means they get away with it.
And the left just let this go by. People who try to defend public education did not see it as in their interest, so they got blindsided.
The right understands that the way to succeed politically is by generating a cultural conflict that feeds into its economic interests. The classic strategy that the conservatives had for shrinking the New Deal was their creation of anti-tax sentiment. Proposition 13, the anti-tax referendum in California, started out as an effort to lower the taxes on renters and raising the taxes on business and some property owners. Anti-tax sentiment didn’t start out as necessarily having a conservative bent, but it was reshaped in California by savvy organizers who used race in a coded way. They said, 'Where are your tax dollars going? Are they going to public housing projects and no-good welfare recipients?' They shifted the ground of the anti-tax movement toward calling for lower taxes on property owners and businesses, leaving out renters for instance. They then used coded racist rhetoric to create anti-tax sentiment among people who were actually going to be hurt economically by the provisions of the final anti-tax bill. The rhetoric led them to believe that they were losing money or that their money was being re-distributed down, when in fact most of them were recipients of that redistribution. The only reason it worked was because of the racial politics: cultural politics drove tax reform. Now anti-tax sentiment is one of the central mechanisms by which all kinds of heinous goals are achieved.
Almost any issue where the right has gotten a lot of mileage has depended for its success on the separation of culture and economics on the part of the left.
PA: How do you make this point when talking about abortion?
LD: The shift from a broad, progressive reproductive freedom politics to abortion rights politics was a disaster. When you talk about abortion rights that aren’t separated from support for childbearing, the right to choose in the broadest sense, to afford to have children, support for child care and households, and freedom from sterilization abuse, then it’s more appealing and harder to attack. It talks to more people. When you just have abortion rights pulled out of that, a lot of folks see it as like eugenics. It sets abortion up as an issue that can be appropriated into a right-wing vision, and separated from all the other issues related to reproductive freedom. It’s an economic issue too when it’s understood as how people deal with their reproductive choices and make decisions about constructing a household caring for children. It’s all about the way that households and peoples’ intimate lives are bound up with the economic foundations of their lives.
Abortion is part of that. Abortion is one of the things that people need to have access to in order to be able to make decisions. But when it’s separated out as if it was merely a cultural issue and a single, isolatable issue, it can be appropriated by the right. The Reproductive Rights National Network really made the progressive case, but there’s nobody around now who does. NARAL and other organizations will support a Republican if s/he’s pro-abortion. They’ve completely separated it from its context. So it has become a religious issue – is it a life or not? That becomes the discussion, rather than how we can collectively support people’s choices to have or not have children in a way that is supportive of them.
If it’s just about abortion, we won’t get far. But how about preventing unwanted pregnancies? We can all agree on that. We need to talk about the range of reproductive freedom issues. That means providing economic support for having a child as well as the social support for not having a child. That’s a conversation that can go somewhere.
PA: So what does the right get from turning complex issues into single cultural issues? Is it just keeping people in a tizzy? Thomas Frank says they don’t care about winning, they just want to make people confused. But it seems to me they have won on abortion rights: abortion isn’t available in 80 percent of US counties.
LD: I have a problem with the idea that people are simply being duped or that they have 'false consciousness.' This is the wrong approach, because so-called cultural issues are real. People have conflicting interests, and the right appeals to just one, at the expense of all the others.
It is self-defeating for the progressive movement to do that. It creates a situation where these 'identity' constituencies can be co-opted by neoliberalism. For example, this has happened to a large section of the gay movement. People will vote for a Republican on the single issue of their stance on gay marriage. Disaggregation is not in our interest. We are the majority; the more we can connect, the stronger we are.
If you envision the abortion issue as just a Supreme Court decision, then the right hasn’t won it—yet. If you envision it as people’s access to medical care, then the right has made substantial progress. Abortion politics on the right are actually part of a strategy to bring together constituencies who don’t have a lot of overlapping interests, for example, churches whose congregations aren’t rich people. So they may be anti-abortion on religious grounds, but actually in the larger reproductive politics question they have more in common with us. Abortion is the only issue that they would disagree with us on. So, the right takes that issue and pushes it to the fore and brings these churches into their alliance. Like with taxes – they brought together people whose economic interests were not in common by producing a rhetoric that created an alliance.
It’s alliance politics, but they have to be able to separate the issues in order to make that happen. The left collaborates in that by allowing the issue to be separated in our own framework. Single-issue equal rights politics have largely replaced a broad progressive framework. This allows single issues to be re-appropriated into another more conservative framework.
If the contest were between the right’s context and our context, we win. But they take the single issues out, and then they build an alliance around this thing and this thing and this thing, and they win with people who really agree more with us on most things.
PA: You’re saying there are big majorities on a range of women’s rights issues, equal rights, equal pay, etc.?
LD: And gay rights, which is a harder issue. There are solid majorities on every issue. Civil unions: 60 percent. Non-discrimination in terms of economics: 75 percent. Housing non-discrimination: 85 percent. Huge majorities on almost every gay rights issue. But you can focus on marriage and actually produce the illusion of an anti-gay populace, and put into place policies that are functionally dangerous not just to gay people. That’s the other invisible thing. A lot of anti-marriage amendments are doing away with domestic partnerships, which are not just for gay people. For example, I went to sign up for domestic partnership in New York after 9/11, because I was worried about hospital rights, etc. We got into a long line and were the only gay couple there. It was all straight people who didn’t want to get married, but wanted next-of-kin protection, etc. Domestic partnership is an alternative to the one size fits all, sanctified marriage arrangement.
Given that most people don’t live all their lives in those kinds of households anyway, having multiple recognitions serves everybody. So you have reciprocal beneficiary in Hawaii and Vermont, which allows people who are not romantic couples, for example, sisters, to qualify for some of the benefits of marriage or domestic partnership without asserting a sexual relationship. A lot of elderly people live that way, elderly women especially, because they live so much longer. If they could have certain benefits of marriage, it would be very helpful to them. So, multiplying these benefits and rights is good for everybody. That all of these other alternatives are being wiped out at the same time as gay marriage is not visible publicly.
Even in states where gay marriage has succeeded like Massachusetts, they’re doing away with domestic partnership, because there’s gay marriage. A lot of the corporations and universities say we don’t need this anymore. If domestic partnership is gone, you get a one-size-fits-all institution with all of the ideological baggage and the economic assumptions. So, the whole debate has narrowed when actually the trend had been to diversify. The exclusion of gay people made this pressure to come up with new statuses: civil unions, domestic partnerships and reciprocal beneficiaries. All of these new things had the function of de-sanctifying marriage, making all of these other things possible. Now it’s shrinking, and it’s not only or even primarily affecting gay people. And it’s not even anti-gay sentiment that’s driving it – but it looks that way.
PA: How can we talk about the gay marriage issue as being economic?
LD: Marriage is in decline statistically, because most people live in much more complicated ways. Households don’t usually line up with the ideal of lifetime marriage. Private households are being more burdened with responsibilities, because the social safety net is being cut back. With the attack on Social Security, it will mean even more. Child care, care for the elderly, care for the disabled, care for the sick are more the responsibility of private households. At the same time that private households are being stripped of resources, people have fewer benefits and lower wages. This institution is being piled up with responsibilities and stripped of resources and is being idealized. What a fantastic template for a right-wing agenda. They say, 'Look at this important institution where people take care of each other.' And as the household is being stripped of resources, people who are in this situation are more terrified for their future than ever. Their jobs are less secure; they have fewer benefits. They don’t know what they’re going to do when they retire. They don’t know how they’re going to take care of their aging parents. They’re panicking, and the institution that is supposed to provide all of this is exclusively more and more the private household. So they panic and say, 'If we’re not going to have health care and we’re not going to have Social Security, we’d better have a stable marriage, because without that, we’re at sea.'
So then somebody comes out and says, 'Gay marriage will undermine the stability of marriage.' And people react by saying, 'Oh no, we need marriage, because we need a stable household. It’s starting to be all we got.' So there’s panic. But people also know that marriage is not stable and that marital households are not stable. People are responding to the part of the message about stabilizing and preserving marriage, at a moment when they are more and more dependent on it.
People who aren’t married are becoming more and more at risk economically. Marriage promotion programs in welfare reform are mainly aimed at women (who are the ones opting out of marriage), promoting the idea that you should get married because that’s how your economic support should happen. Meanwhile, the right is doing away with other sources of social support. In an indirect way, corralling women back into marriage as a source of economic support serves the interests of privatizers who want households to take on all these responsibilities, so that corporations and the state can shed them.
The strategy all around is to create insecurity, and then play on it. The gay marriage issue isn’t about what it seems to be about, I don’t think.
PA: So it isn’t driven by anti-gay feelings?
LD: Most of the people who are voting for the banning of gay marriage support gay rights in every other way. Someone will go in and vote in favor of an amendment to ban gay marriage, but they’ll be in favor of civil union – which is the same thing. They’re opposed to economic discrimination and housing discrimination. The numbers of support for basic gay rights, are big majorities everywhere, but not when you make it about gay marriage.
The gay movement is as colossally misguided on that as the reproductive rights movement was to isolate abortion. Instead of making it about democracy and diversity, many are making it about one institution and using rhetoric that plays right into the right wing rhetoric of responsibility. That’s what they used in welfare reform; it was called the 'personal responsibility' act. So the rhetoric that the gay movement is using actually plays into the strategies that are used to corral poor women into marriage.
PA: The privatization issue is key.
LD: Every single person is affected by the fact that they are losing social services of one kind of another and they have fewer resources. Most people, except the very rich, have to meet all these needs with no help. Everybody is panicking about that, and people are thinking this is my private problem.
The issue is to get people to see that making private households carry this burden is impossible, insane, redistributive in the wrong direction – all of those things. I don’t think it’s that hard to explain. There just need to be the situations where this can be addressed. It’s not complicated. We have to say this is how marriage politics has to do with social security – they’re all related. The right cannot succeed if people make these connections.
PA: How should we describe what we are for?
LD: What I would hope we would be for is the multiplication of the types of household and partnership recognitions that provide things that people need: next of kin recognition, joint tax filing ability and to allow a range of civil recognitions that provide benefits that you can choose. Marriage should be a religious institution that the state has nothing to do with. So people can get married if they want to. What people should be able to do in terms of the state is to have a choice of forms of household or partnership where sexuality and romance are not the issue.
PA: What’s your take on the red state-blue state paradigm used to describe the country?
LD: I think it’s profoundly distorting, because what we have are all kinds of shades of purple. For example, the difference between whether a state is red or blue can be a very small percentage. What’s scary is that if you look at the map, it’s the more or less the Civil War map. It tells you right away that racial politics played a crucial role in producing the electoral outcome. It also has to do with patterns of corporate development and low-wage industries.
In every state the vote is much more complicated. What people voted for and why is complex and becomes distorted by that red-blue. It also feeds into a mistaken condescension to the red states, creating the strangest alliances. For example, we’re at this moment where it appears that leftists can be aligned with cool corporate progressives, but not with working people? Then it makes it look like working people are aligned with the interests of free market capital, which is crazy. And those alliances are then considered cultural reality.
I’m from a red state, so I feel like, 'Come on, you have no idea what you’re talking about.' New York is incredibly diverse, so you have to look at what the interests are that might drive one red county might be so totally different than another. In every case, the way economics and culture intersect produces transient alliances that get these results. Conservatives have just been really smart about seeing culture and economics as bound together, and also in building alliances around single issues. The left has been really dumb on this. Listening to the debate now makes my ears bleed! Some people are saying we need to move to the right on the cultural issues, and others say we need to just ditch the cultural issues, and just talk about economics. That’s the wrong way to go.
PA: What’s your experience with working-class audiences on these issues?
LD: The most positive thing is the project of trying to bring 'cultural' issues in, not just for the purpose of bringing them in, but because it’s crucial to the effectiveness of the labor movement. When the labor movement has a very narrow focus, just wages and benefits, for example, they just become part of the management structure. Of course it’s better that they’re there than not there, but when unions look in a larger way at the way people live and what their needs are, they’re able to actually be an oppositional force.
People’s interest in their unions grows when this is the case. If you talk about sex, in the union hall, about safe sex education, about AIDS, whatever, lots of people will come out. If you turn the union hall into a place where people can come to talk about the conditions of their lives and what can be done to improve them, you get a more energized union. This means dealing with workers as working people with whole lives, rather than just employees of a certain corporation. Even if everyone doesn’t agree, you do get energy and interest, and you also get opportunities to talk about things in a way that makes these connections.
Labor can be an oppositional force, a progressive force. After World War II, unions, because of anti-communism, were pushed strongly towards the business union model. They rejected earlier models of the more whole life approach where union halls were cultural centers. People want to be whole, functional, cultural, spiritual, intellectual beings who determine the course of their lives. So bringing all these so-called cultural issues is part of that. I think the union movement is the only institution we have, that reaches everyday life. The unions can’t be separate from the cultural issues.
